My Life As A Man

long-range calamity befalling me, I objected strenuously to being “babied,” as I thought of it-particularly by someone whose life, though admirable, was grounded in ways I was just too young to be concerned about. As I saw it, it was essential for me to be able to confront whatever troubles I’d made for myself without his, or anyone else’s, assistance. In brief, I was as arrogant (and blind) as youth and luck and an aristocratic literary bent could make me, and so, when he invited me up to Columbia for lunch I told him, “I’ll work it all out, don’t worry.” “But why should it be ‘work’? Your work, is your work, not this little Indian.” “I take it that’s some kind of euphemism. For the record, the mother’s family was Irish, the father’s German.” “Yeah? She looks a little Apache to me, with those eyes and that hair. There’s something savage there, Peppy. No? All right, don’t answer. Sneer now, pay later. You weren’t brought up for savagery, kid.” “I know. Nice boy. Jewish.” “What’s so bad about that? You are a nice civilized Jewish boy, with some talent and some brains. How much remains to be seen. Why don’t you attend to that and leave the lions to Hemingway.” “What is that supposed to mean, Moey?” “You. You look like you’ve been sleeping in the jungle.” “Nope. Just down on Ninth Street.” “I thought girls were for fun, Pep. Not to scare the shit out of you.” I was offended both by his low- mindedness and his meddling and refused to talk further about it. Afterward I looked in the mirror for the signs of fear-or doom. I saw nothing: still looked like Tarnopol the Triumphant to me.

The morning after Maureen had announced herself pregnant, I told her to take a specimen of urine to the pharmacy on Second and Ninth; that way, said I without hiding my skepticism, we could shortly learn just how pregnant she was. “In other words, you don’t believe me. You want to close your eyes to the whole thing!” “Just take the urine and shut up.” So she did as she was told: took a specimen of urine to the drugstore for the pregnancy test-only it wasn’t her urine. I did not find this out until three years later, when she confessed to me (in the midst of a suicide attempt) that she had gone from my apartment to the drugstore by way of Tompkins Square Park, lately the hippie center of the East Village, but back in the fifties still a place for the neighborhood poor to congregate and take the sun. There she approached a pregnant Negro woman pushing a baby carriage and told her she represented a scientific organization willing to pay the woman for a sample of her urine. Negotiations ensued. Agreement reached, they retired to the hallway of a tenement building on Avenue B to complete the transaction. The pregnant woman pulled her underpants down to her knees, and squatting in a corner of the unsavory hallway-still heaped with rubbish (just as Maureen had described it) when I paid an unsentimental visit to the scene of the crime upon my return to New York only a few years later-delivered forth into Maureen’s preserve jar the stream that sealed my fate. Here Maureen forked over two dollars and twenty-five cents. She drove a hard bargain, my wife.

During the four days that we had to wait-according to Maureen-for the result of the pregnancy test, she lay on my bed recalling scenes and conversations out of her wasted past: delirious (or feigning delirium-or both), she quarreled once again with Mezik, screamed her hatred at Mezik’s buddy from the upholstery factory, and choked and wept with despair to discover Walker in their bathroom in Cambridge, dressed in her underwear, his own white sweat socks stuffed into the cups of the brassiere. She would not eat; she would not converse; she refused to let me telephone the psychiatrist who had once tried treating her for a couple of months; when I called her friends over on Bleecker Street, she refused to talk to them. I went ahead anyway and suggested to them that they might want to come over and see her-maybe they at least could get her to eat something-whereupon the wife grabbed the phone away from the husband and said, “We don’t want to see that one again ever,” and hung up. So, all was not well with the “schizorenos” on Bleecker Street either, after Maureen’s brief visit…And I was afraid now to leave the apartment for fear that she would try to kill herself when I was gone. I had never lived through three such days before in my life, though I was to know a hundred more just as grim and frightening in the years to come.

The night before we were to learn the test results, Maureen abruptly stopped “hallucinating” and got up from bed to wash her face and drink some orange juice. At first she wouldn’t speak directly to me, but for an hour sat perfectly still, calm and controlled, in a chair in the living room, wrapped in my bathrobe. Finally I told her that as she was up and around, I was going out to take a walk around the block. “Don’t try anything,” I said, “I’m just going to get some air.” Her tone, in response, was mild and sardonic. “Air? Oh, where, I wonder?” “I’m taking a walk around the block.” “You’re about to leave me, Peter, I know that. Just the way you’ve left every girl you’ve ever known. Find ‘em-fuck ‘em-and-forget ‘em Flaubert.” “I’ll be right back.” When I unlatched the door to go out, she said, as though addressing a judge from the witness stand-prophetic bitch!-“And I never saw him again, Your Honor.”

I went around to the drugstore and asked the pharmacist if by any chance the result of Mrs. Tarnopol’s pregnancy test-so Maureen had identified herself, just a bit prematurely-due back tomorrow might have come in that night. He told me the result had come in that morning. Maureen had gotten it wrong-we hadn’t to wait four days, only three. Was the error inadvertent? Just one of her “mistakes”? (“So I make mistakes!” she’d cry. “I’m not perfect, damn it! Why must everybody in this world be a perfect robot-a compulsive little middle-class success machine, like you! Some of us are human.”) But if not a mistake, if intentional, why? Out of habit? An addiction to falsification? Or was this her art of fiction, “creativity” gone awry…?

Harder to fathom was the result. How could Maureen be pregnant for two whole months and manage to keep it from me? It made no sense. Such restraint was beyond her-represented everything she was not. Why would she have let me throw her out that first time without striking back with this secret? It made no sense. It could not he.

Only it was. Two months pregnant, by me.

Only how? I could not even remember the last time we two had had intercourse. Yet she was pregnant, somehow, and if I didn’t marry her, she would take her life rather than endure the humiliation of an abortion or an adoption or of abandoning a fatherless child. It went without saying that she, who could not hold a job for more than six months, was incapable of raising a child on her own. And it went without saying-to me, to me-that the father of this fatherless child-to-be was Peter Tarnopol. Never once did it occur to me that if indeed she were pregnant, someone other than I might have done it. Yes, I already knew what a liar she was, yet surely not so thoroughgoing as to want to deceive me about something as serious as fatherhood. That I couldn’t believe. This woman was not a character out of a play by Strindberg or a novel by Hardy, but someone with whom I’d been living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, sixty minutes by subway and bus from Yonkers, where I’d been born.

Now, unduly credulous as I may have been, I still needn’t have married her; had I been so independent, so manly, so “up” to travail as I aspired to be in my middle twenties, she would never have become my wife, even if a laboratory test had “scientifically” proved that she was with child and even if I had been willing to accept on faith that mine was the penis responsible. I could still have said this: “You want to kill yourself, that’s your business. You don’t want an abortion, also up to you. But I’m not getting married to you, Maureen, under any circumstances. Marrying you would be insane.”

But instead of going home to tell her just that, I walked from Ninth Street all the way up to Columbia and back, concluding on upper Broadway-only two blocks from Morris’s building- that the truly manly way to face up to my predicament was to go back to the apartment, pretending that I still did not know the result of the pregnancy test, and deliver the following oration: “Maureen, what’s been going on here for three days makes no sense. I don’t care if you’re pregnant or not. I want you to marry me, regardless of how the test comes out tomorrow. I want you to be my wife.” You see, I just couldn’t believe, given her behavior during the past three days, that she was bluffing about doing herself in; I was sure that if I walked out on her for good, she would kill herself. And that was unthinkable-I could not be the cause of another’s death. Such a suicide was murder. So I would marry her instead. And, further, I would do my best to make it appear that in marrying her I had acted out of choice rather than necessity, for if our union were to be anything other than a nightmare of recrimination and resentment, it would have to appear to Maureen-and even, in a way, to me-that I had married her because I had decided that I wanted to, rather than because I had been blackmailed, or threatened, or terrorized into it.

But why ever would I want to? The whole thing made no sense-especially as we had not copulated in God only knew how long! And I never wanted to again! I hated her.

Yes, it was indeed one of those grim and unyielding predicaments such as I had read about in fiction, such as Thomas Mann might have had in mind when he wrote in an autobiographical sketch the sentence that I had already chosen as one of the two portentous epigraphs for A Jewish Father: “All actuality is deadly earnest, and it is morality itself that, one with life, forbids us to be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth.”